Last year, I wrote several emails in which I recommended Sparkloop, a paid newsletter-recommendation platform.
As you might know, the promise of Sparkloop is quality newsletter subscribers, who will actually engage with your newsletter, all in a completely hands-off manner.
That’s the promise. Here’s the reality:
Sparkloop did grow my list, with a bunch of previous newsletter subscribers, who in theory should have been a good match for my health newsletter.
Plus, Sparkloop allows you to screen for subscribers engage with your newsletter via either clicks or opens, and to get rid of everyone else. As a result, my open rates stayed consistently high.
Sounds good, right?
But around December, cracks started to appear.
I regularly ran in-newsletter polls in my health newsletter. They weren’t getting a lot of participation. I also ran a survey outside the newsletter, on my website. Exactly one person filled that out. I put out a relevant, low-ticket offer. I got no buyers.
Everything I just told you happened with my health newsletter. But it’s backed up by an experiment I ran with Sparkloop on this marketing newsletter.
That experiment was small but perhaps indicative.
It involved newsletter subscribers that I vetted even more closely than I was doing for my health newsletter, both for source and for engagement. And yet, none of those vetted Sparkloop subscribers have bought anything from me, in spite of being on my list for months. None of them has even opted in for the free training am putting on at the end of this month.
The point I want to make is something that’s easy to forget if you’re a marketer:
A name is not just a name. An email address is not just an email address.
It matters how people find you, first interact with you, with what intent, and in what frame of mind.
Of course, this matters for whether they choose to engage with you in the first place. But it also persists over time, even if they somehow decide to give you a bit of their attention to start with. That’s obvious as water in the real world, but it’s easy to forget in the marketing world.
Conclusion:
So long, Sparkloop. Like everything else in life that sounds too good to be true, you were in fact too good to be true.
You might wonder what I will do to grow my list now that I have axed Sparkloop.
I have special plans for my health newsletter.
But for this marketing newsletter, I plan on going back to the three warhorses that have gotten me probably 80% of my total subscribers, and probably 99% of my best subscribers.
If you would like to know what those three warhorses are, come join me for that free training at the end of this month. On the training, I will talk about how I write and even profit from this newsletter, and how you can do it too if you’d like to do something similar.
The training will happen on Monday January 22, 2024 at 8pm CET/2pm EST/11am PST. I will send out a recording if you cannot make it live, but you will have to be signed up to my list first. Click here to sign up.